Modern Information Technology (“IT”) departments are faced with a number of substantial difficulties. In large IT departments may employ a number of programmers and system designers whose responsibilities may include the design, implementation, and maintenance of the companies software. One of the more significant parts of some IT departments includes Enterprise Resource Planning (“ERP”) software. These ERP software packages are usually purchased in the form of modules that must be customized and integrated into a custom software application that fits the particular needs of the business. The acquisition of an ERP software package can be a significant expense. Additionally, the planning, implementation, and maintenance of the companies customized application can consume a significant portion of an IT department's resources in both manpower and finances.
A number of these ERP software packages seek to integrate substantial portions of the operations of the company. For example, an ERP package may contain modules for manufacturing oversight, supply chain management, financial management, project management, human resource management, customer relationship management, and data warehousing to name a few. A number of tools and programming languages have been developed to assist in the planning and implementation of a customized software application for a particular business. Some of these tools involve the creation of software models that can interact at a higher level of abstraction with the underlying modules. The creation of models has been standardized by a number of organizations such as the Object Management Group (“OMG”).
OMG is a not-for-profit, open membership computer industry specification consortium that is responsible for creating and distributing a number of standards related to software models. Standardization has a number of significant benefits. Software models that conform to the meta-model specifications that standards bodies like OMG adopt can be platform independent which makes them highly portable. Additionally, programmers that are familiar with these models can apply them in a number of different situations. OMG has produced a technical specification for the Unified Modeling Language (“UML”) that is may be used to derive models of a software application's structure, behavior and architecture. UML is additionally useful in modeling various business process and data structures needed to operate a business.
Modeling in a UML profile allows precise representation of business processes and rules in a technology independent form. Moving from a technology neutral model to a specific platform requires the transformation of the higher level meta-models into intermediate level models that are specific to the desired technology platform. From these technology or platform specific models there are software tools that can transform the models into software code and associated files that can be used in the customization, and compilation of the customer specific software application. The use of standard compliant meta-models has significantly simplified the process of creating custom software applications from the ERP software packages.
One limitation of this approach is the terminology of the underlying software package is lost in the modeling process. Since these software models are intended for use across a wide range of ERP software packages and a wide range of technology platforms, the terminology used in the models has been standardized to the models. A user, programmer, or system integrator that is familiar with the terminology associated with the underlying software package, the ERP package for example, may not be familiar with the terminology of the model. This can pose a significant difficulty to an IT department in terms of time and costs associated with the development, deployment and maintenance of a custom software application.
Alternatively, an IT department may wish to forego the use of these models in favor of developing their custom application in the native terminology. This presents significant limitations since there are a wide range of software packages that have been developed to interact with these standard meta-models. These packages would not be available to the IT department that foregoes the use of models. Attempts to customize the models to make them more recognizable must be done in a way that does not impact the ability of these packages to interact with the models.
Therefore there exists a need for an apparatus, system and methods to develop custom skins for software models that conform to industry meta-models.